The Oracle's Daughter

A gripping chronicle of the rise and fall of a woman-led cult--and the enduring allure of extremism across America's turbulent religious history. On a cool fall night in 1999, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Green crept out of her house, retrieved a backpack from its hiding place, and ran for her life. She was escaping not just the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult operating out of the New Mexico desert, but also the punishments and cruelty of the cult's leader--her mother, Deborah. In The Oracle's Daughter , Harrison Hill traces the fascinating beginnings and violent end of ACMTC, from its early days as an outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture to its descent into conspiracy-fueled abuse. This is the story of three women--Deborah, the group's founder and self-proclaimed oracle; Maura, one of its first members; and Sarah, Deborah's daughter--bound together by a punitive, baroque set of radical beliefs and practices, including exorcism, kidnapping, and the horrific mistreatment of those who fell out of the leaders' favor. With a dramatic, deeply researched narrative tracing the strange twists and turns of the country's religious development, The Oracle's Daughter illuminates the porous boundary between the fringe and the mainstream--and shows how much more vulnerable we are to extremism than we might like to think.

A gripping chronicle of the rise and fall of a woman-led cult--and the enduring allure of extremism across America's turbulent religious history. On a cool fall night in 1999, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Green crept out of her house, retrieved a backpack from its hiding place, and ran for her life. She was escaping not just the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult operating out of the New Mexico desert, but also the punishments and cruelty of the cult's leader--her mother, Deborah. In The Oracle's Daughter , Harrison Hill traces the fascinating beginnings and violent end of ACMTC, from its early days as an outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture to its descent into conspiracy-fueled abuse. This is the story of three women--Deborah, the group's founder and self-proclaimed oracle; Maura, one of its first members; and Sarah, Deborah's daughter--bound together by a punitive, baroque set of radical beliefs and practices, including exorcism, kidnapping, and the horrific mistreatment of those who fell out of the leaders' favor. With a dramatic, deeply researched narrative tracing the strange twists and turns of the country's religious development, The Oracle's Daughter illuminates the porous boundary between the fringe and the mainstream--and shows how much more vulnerable we are to extremism than we might like to think.